Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 529: Surrender

(3rd Person POV)

The bridge of Solarus's Divine Ship had gone quiet enough to hear the deck bleed. Starlight ran in a slow pool from the god split at the waist, and every soul aboard stood frozen where the fight had left them, watching the body that wore Apollion's face dangle from a stranger's hand.

Arthur's grip closed, and the neck gave.

The thing that had gone about in golden, borrowed skin came apart against his fingers, and he drew the essence out of it the way a man drains a cup — every last thread of divinity it had carried, pulled clean and cool into himself. Power settled through him. It was real power, a deity's power. Set against everything he already held, it was no more than a single droplet returned to an ocean.

Then something buried in the essence caught, and held.

"Oh?" Arthur turned the trace over, examining it from the inside. "Now that's a surprise. I actually came away with a shard of the «Transmigration» Authority."

A panel resolved in the air before his eyes.

[You have consumed a Deity Essence bearing a trace of the «Transmigration» Authority. This Authority can be developed, and its power made your own.]

"Useful." He let a slow, pleased curl into his mouth. "System — with this, can I trace it to its source? Find the counterpart who calls himself the Lord of Cinema, Souls, and Greed?"

[Possible, master, but not simple. The timelines outnumber the stars in a sky, and many deities across them carry the same Authority; not all of them are him. Worse still, he can spend «Transmigration» to leap from one timeline into the next and abandon the one behind him. Each thread must be sifted through, one by one, by a mind high enough to hold them all.]

"Then how would I even begin—"

[Leave that part to me, master. I can read this essence down to its grain, and paired with your Authority as the Lord of Time, I can narrow the search to the precise thread he walks.]

"Good." He let the trace go dormant, filed for later. "It's yours to handle, Creator System."

He had said most of that half to himself, an aside in a conversation no one else on the bridge could follow. Around him the space stayed locked in place. Solarus — bleeding out his starlight in a widening pool, the two halves of him held together only by will and divinity — stared at the empty air where his son had stood, and refused, plainly, to let himself believe any of it.

"W-what is the meaning of this?" The sun god's voice came thick. "You cut down my son. Right in front of me—"

Arthur turned to face him fully. "Your son? Did you not hear a single word of it? Your son has been gone a long, long time. What died just now was never him. It was something far worse than you have ever been, wearing his face and speaking with his mouth. You stood at his shoulder for years, Solarus. You should have seen it. You should have heard it."

Solarus said nothing. Nor did anyone else along the ruined bridge.

Arthur crossed to him. Unhealed, still open at the waist, Solarus tried to drag himself back across the deck — but the strength went out of his limbs before the thought had finished forming, because Arthur sealed the god's body where it lay and stilled it whole. Then he took the head. Only the head, parted from the ruined body with a single clean motion, the life force in it kept deliberately burning so the eyes still tracked and the mouth still worked.

"What are you doing to me?" The head's jaw moved, breathless. "How can you possibly—"

Arthur gave him no answer. He hung the head at his waist by its own golden hair, the way a hunter carries a kill down out of the hills.

"Solarus's army!" The head strained, the old command scraping up through it. "My army — charge this insolent thing, all of you, at once!"

The soldiers ranged the length of the bridge kept their heads bowed and did not move a muscle.

He called again, and again, high and imperious, still certain the world owed him obedience. A single glance from Arthur emptied the bridge of the last of it.

"Listen to me." Arthur's voice went cold and level. "There is exactly one reason you are still burning and not scattered across this deck with the rest. I mean to inherit your kingdom, and every one of the myriad worlds you swallowed to raise it."

Teeth clenched in a head with nothing beneath it. "You imagine I would ever hand you that?"

"If you won't, I have a dimension made ready for precisely this. You would suffer inside it." He said it without heat. "And you would go on suffering inside it, with no end I ever intend to grant."

In truth he would rather not. It was troublesome more than anything else. He could as easily turn his Authority over time on the god and fix him in one unmoving instant forever, but a deity of Solarus's rank, gutted or not, would need watching, and watching was tedious work he had no appetite for. None of that reached his face.

The threat landed regardless. Solarus shuddered where he hung, and along the bridge the survivors of his army shuddered with him. Everything the deck had witnessed pointed the same direction — that the last mistake any of them had left to make was to test the thing now standing in their midst.

Unwilling, the god relented. "...Fine. I yield. Everything I hold is yours to take. But grant me one condition."

Arthur lifted a brow. He had walked no other timeline this far; in none of them had Solarus ever reached the point of bargaining. The strangeness of it held his interest. "And that is?"

"If you mean to spare me, then restore my body, and I'll take myself far from you and never cross into your path again." The head's voice steadied around the ask. "And if you don't mean to spare me — then make it quick. One clean death. Don't leave me to rot in that dimension of yours for eternity."

"Done." Arthur inclined his head. "You'll have your wish, one way or the other."

"Then we make for my empire." Even bodiless, the god reached for logistics. "The crossing will take time. As long as it took this ship to reach that world from the Divine World in the first place—"

"There's no need for any of that."

Arthur was already lifting a hand. Space folded at the gesture, and a portal tore open across the bridge — not onto the black of the void, but onto a skyline.

Solarus's remaining eye went wide. "What—"

Beyond the tear stood Arthur's own Divine Kingdom. The Dionysus Kingdom: a city of glass towers and clean geometry, part Tokyo and part Singapore, lit and ordered in a way that belonged to no age this side of the mortal world. It spread itself out before Solarus and his people, whole and impossible, humming faintly through the open portal.

They felt the wrongness of it first — too strange, too advanced. Then, underneath, they felt the thing that truly undid them: this was the Divine World. Unmistakably. A god's own realm, anchored where only the very highest were permitted to anchor one.

Arthur spent no more words on their shock. He brought them through, and from the heart of the Dionysus Kingdom he took his own Divine Ship and set its course for the seat of Solarus's empire.

The Divine World was vast past reckoning; a single kingdom of it could run as wide as a galaxy. But Arthur's ship was fast, and within a few weeks it had crossed the distance and arrived above the throne-world of the sun god's domain.

The citizens poured out in their multitudes and raised a great roar of welcome, every one of them certain their lord had finally come home. Arthur let the sound build. Then he flicked his wrist, and the colossal statue of Solarus that stood watch over the city crumbled to grey dust in the space of one breath.

The roar broke apart. The crowd scattered in every direction, wailing, calling out to nothing.

Into that panic Arthur drew the head up from his waist and showed it to the god's most devoted — their lord, kept alive, swaying from the hand of a stranger. Some of them threw themselves at him anyway, grief run past all reason. It was Solarus himself who stopped them, his voice come thin from a mouth with no chest to drive it.

And then the god gave the order he had been kept burning to give: that the Origins of every world beneath him pass to Arthur, wholly, without contest, without delay.

Arthur took in the ring of stunned faces and let himself enjoy them for exactly what they were. From the palace at the empire's heart, he claimed what was now his. He sat the throne only Solarus had ever been suffered to sit, closed his eyes, and let the inheritance come.

It came in a flood. The gathered authority of a hundred conquered worlds poured into him and began, slowly, to settle and consolidate and find its place. With it came the Authority of «Light» — Solarus's own — folding into his hands as though it had always been waiting to. And with it came the Faith Energy of every world that had ever turned to pray toward this throne, an entire tide of worship rerouted in a heartbeat to answer a different god.

He opened his eyes again after a few months. The power in him had gone quiet, and vast.

"With this much," Arthur murmured, "there shouldn't be anyone left in the universe with the standing to challenge me. Should there."

He rose from the throne, the head still swaying at his waist, and looked out across the worlds that answered to him now.

"Then it's time to carry the Lord of Entertainment to every last one of them."